And slowly, over that year, it lifted.

The nights got easier.

The questions changed from was it my fault to can Sofia come to my game. They learned, one ordinary safe day at a time, that the floor under them was solid now, that the adults in their life would not turn on them, that they could give their hearts and not have them handed back.

Watching that happen was the only reward I ever wanted from any of it.

A year after San Diego, I took Cruz and Sofia to the coast — not a resort, but a small town in Oregon where my mother lives, in the wooden beach house I built her years ago, the one the Hargraves always found so quaint.

My mother, Herminia, had never once been made welcome in that family.